13 comments

Because you showed the solution (a 2-digit number) as two boxes, I would use two boxes for the addends in the middle. Because I need more coffee, I didn’t “understand” that I needed to use ALL the digits 0 – 9 and since the solution was shown with two boxes for a two digit number, I assumed that each box could only hold one digit. Just a suggestion.

Wow, Lauren, I like your thinking. I do agree with Monier about “the terms in the middle space don’t respectively reflect the terms of the bracket expansion”, but what might be an interesting problem to reflect your idea would be if the original problem had been #(#+#) = ## = #+#.

Hi – 2 of my students worked for a while on this and reached total frustration. To help them, I checked the answer, to see if I could offer guidance. It was only then that we realized that the single boxes sometimes represent two digits and sometimes represent one digit!! AAARGH!! And now I see that people have commented on that previously. Should have read the comments. Can you revise this one so that it is consistently 1 box – 1 digit? Thanks! And, yeah, we didn’t get that we needed to use all the digits. Otherwise, awesome!

Since the problem is meant to focus on the distributive property, we have changed the image as has been suggested on this thread, to allow two-digit numbers in the middle. Apologies for the inconvenience.